A Good Surprise

Rating: Null/10 (15 July 2003)

***If you haven't seen this movie yet, don't read anything about it. It'll be a more pure viewing experience.**** I would hazard a guess that nearly ever viewer of this film came into it thinking it would be a horror film. I was looking forward to a horror film, because, I was kind of tired, and I was only going to hang out with a girl. However, as the title of this review might reveal, I was pleasantly surprised by what I ended up seeing. I guess one of the points is that a good movie will always wake you up.
Almost immediately I was struck by how unorthodox the film was; an important point because if it were a horror film, even one like "The Ring", a large degree of the film would be typical, in terms of camera movement and photography, staging, and the like. But when we opened "28 Days Later", we see a fully naked Jim--something a typical horror movie would never do, because it would alienate a large portion of the audience. Then, there was the lack of score, which lead to very empty scenes (for a horror movie). In short, it became very obvious that this was no slasher flick.
Okay, enough exposition. This film was magnificent. It blew me away. It is probably the best film I have seen all year. I admired its look, low-res, independent, amateuristic at some points, sometimes gritty. The movement on the picture in many sequences is just excellent. The entire sequence of Jim walking through an empty London is now a staple in my cinematic treasure box, if such a thing exists. With echoes of Kubrick, and the New Wave movement (heavy on the latter).
I like the idea of portraying rage as a virus...its a fairly easy connection to make, if you think about it. That's probably the best part of the movie, that idea. Because in the beginning, we are told that the uninfected are good, and the infected are bad, are dangerous, but as we go on, Danny Boyle slowly begins to illustrate the similarity between infected and uninfected--Selena killing Mark without thinking, the insanity of the soldiers. But the finest point of the film is made in the climax, when Jim unleashes the infected soldier on the compound, and before. When faced with almost certain death, Jim's form of survival becomes rage. When he runs through the house, showing no compassion for even the cowering black soldier; when he saves the two women, he is almost undistinguishable, aesthetically, from the infected. Boyle makes the point ultimate, that humanity is rage, is angry as the infected, and that humanity is almost a virus. Indeed, this point is brought up in the dinner scene, after the omelet, by the New Age Sergeant, but it escapes any but scant notice. (Similar to Coppola divulging the moral of Apocalypse Now Redux in the dinner conversation at the French Plantation.) Thinking about it as I write, Boyle also references the first part of Kubrick's "2001". There is some connection between the apes discovering violence as a way of evolution, and the apes carrying the virus which decimates England.